Scaling Food as Medicine Across Populations and Geography

Over the past decade, diverse Food as Medicine (also called Food is Medicine) interventions have been implemented across the U.S. and demonstrated positive health-related outcomes. However, there are significant barriers to scaling Food as Medicine to ensure that each patient is able to participate in the program most appropriate for their health needs, which may range from medically tailored meals to groceries to produce prescriptions. The goal of this project is to build partnerships and conduct formative research aimed at scaling Food as Medicine as a strategy to address the inter-related challenges of nutrition insecurity and health equity. 

​​In 2022, California approved an 1115/1915(b) waiver, known as CalAIM, which includes Food As Medicine as one of 14 pre-approved services that Medi-Cal managed care plans are permitted to offer. However, there has been very low uptake of this opportunity. To date, less than 30,000 of California’s 15 million Medi-Cal patients have participated in interventions in the two years of implementation. There is an urgent need to identify effective ways to scale Food as Medicine across California and ultimately nationally.

Our team will develop and pilot test a ‘Food as Medicine Network' designed to directly overcome the documented challenges to scaling. The network will receive patient referrals from healthcare organizations, match patients with the appropriate Food as Medicine program, connect patients with the food organization(s) that provides that program, and process the reimbursement from the indicated health plan. The network will further facilitate research to understand effectiveness, and, importantly, heterogeneity of effects by patient characteristics, geographic setting, and other factors.